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Category: Fifth Amendment

In one of his essays, Madison noted that freedom came about in Europe when the people rose up and cast off or intimidated tyrants, who reluctantly granted the people the freedoms they sought. That was, in Madison’s words, “power granting liberty.” The American experience was the opposite, he argued. After we seceded from Great Britain, the free people of the 13 independent states voluntarily came together and through the states delegated discrete amounts of power to a central government. That was, in Madison’s words, “liberty granting power,” especially since the people reserved to themselves the liberties they did not delegate away.